A few weeks ago, my friend Jon turned me on to a cool service called FolderShare. This service allows you to transparently share files across multiple computers, so that you always have access to your important files.
It works very simply. Install a small proxy application that sits patiently with your tray icons on each computer you want to share with. This application watches the files you care about, and when they change it sends a notification message to the other machines in your sharing network. Then, the application manages the copying of the changed files to all of the relevant destinations. They offer 3 levels of service; the basic service is free to use/trial, and the two "paid for" services are $49.95 and $99.95 per year respectively. The free service only allows 2 shared folders to be set up, with a maximum of 500 files. The middle service allows a lot more folders/files, and the most costly service allows many more folders and files, as well as compression for transfers, file splitting and other efficiency measures. No files are ever sent via the FolderShare servers - only notifications - so your transfers are secure. You can turn on encrypted transfers if you wish.
So far I have been running this successfully on machines with all sorts of different connections - NAT connections, direct, proxied and firewalled etc. It has done a great job with all of them.
One other great feature is the ability to access any of your machines from the FolderShare website. Once you are logged in to your account, you can drill through your hard drive and download files as you wish (albeit unencrypted). This means you can potentially access your important files whenever and whereever you wish.
Omar posted about a new addition to the service - the support of MSN Desktop Search in FolderShare. As Omer says "Log on to FolderShare from any computer on the planet. Enter text in the search box, and watch as you get back results from anything that is indexed on your machine running MSN Desktop Search."
Wow! So now, not only can you get to all your files from anywhere in the world, you can actually find the ones you only vaguely recall using the power of MSN Desktop Search.
I am currently only a "free" subscriber, but this service is becoming so useful, I may just have to upgrade to the pro version!
